ELLIS LUCIA/THE TIMES-PICAYUNEA $40 million expansion at the Louisiana Medical Center & Heart Hospital near Lacombe adds patient rooms, operating rooms and radiology facilities. The expansion is set to open on Wednesday.

The Louisiana Medical Center & Heart Hospital near Lacombe will open on Wednesday its $40-million expansion, a four-story addition that triples the facility's bed capacity and signals to north shore residents that it is a general acute-care hospital, not just a heart hospital.

Staff members say the 109,000-square-foot expansion will allow the hospital to further meet the needs of St. Tammany Parish's enlarged post-Hurricane Katrina population, a surge that spurred the hospital to begin "generalizing" its services several years ago, expanding itself beyond the cardiac and spinal-care specialties that had been its sole purview when it opened in February 2003.

Lynne Black, the hospital's director of business development, said the addition's bells and whistles, such as a new outpatient reception area on the first floor "will allow quicker through-put, helping patients get to see their doctors and get out faster."

The hospital's emergency room director, Dr. Lloyd Gueringer, said the wait for emergency care is much less than at other St. Tammany Parish facilities. That fact coupled with the expansion - which increases the number of emergency room beds from 10 to 20 - should draw more patients to the hospital, he said.

Gueringer said they are less busy, in part, because the community still thinks of the facility as solely a heart hospital.

"I think there's a big misconception that all we do is cardiac care," Gueringer said.

Originally named the Louisiana Heart Hospital, it has since re-christened itself the Louisiana Medical Center and Heart Hospital to better reflect its more generalized focus.

The newly completed expansion supports a corporate-wide effort by MedCath, the Charlotte, N.C.-based health care company that operates the hospital, to bolster its non-heart acute care services.

New operating rooms, holding and recovery beds and radiology facilities - complete with a new MRI machine - along with the new waiting area and emergency room will be located side-by-side in the expanded facility, allowing easier interplay between the various sections, according to Glenda Dobson, the hospital's vice president of clinical services.

The original hospital building is two stories and 101,000 square feet, so the expansion more than doubles its size.

It adds patient rooms to the new unit's second, third and fourth floors, increasing the hospital's capacity from 58 to 177 rooms.

While the hospital will only open on Wednesday the 39 patient rooms on the second floor, it now has the proper licensing and space to open an additional 40 rooms on its third floor at any time. It also has the 40 more rooms on the fourth floor whenever increased patient loads justify applying for the additional licensing required, according to staff members.

The only services the hospital does not now offer are obstetrics and pediatrics. O. Edwin French, the president and chief executive officer of MedCath Corp., has said that if demand later warrants those specialties, "we will certainly have the space to do that."

French also has said the tripling of the Lacombe facility's capacity would make it the largest MedCath facility in the nation and that the expansion would help the surrounding area, boosting the development of the Louisiana 434 corridor. The hospital is on Louisiana 434, just north of Interstate 12.

While bemoaning the current unstable economy and proposed cuts to hospitals by the state Legislature, Louisiana Hospital Association President John Matessino said during an interview on Thursday that the north shore is a unique economic climate for hospitals, one that has been cushioned by its post-Hurricane Katrina population surge.

In terms of the Lacombe hospital, Matessino added that its push towards generalization also makes sense in that context, "to be a more full-service hospital for the people who are moving to the area."

The St. Tammany Parish Hospital in Covington is planning a $60 million expansion "to meet the growing demand for healthcare in St. Tammany Parish and surrounding areas," according to its literature. It will expand its bed capacity from 237 to 321 by adding fifth and sixth floors with 42 rooms each, its literature states.

Black, the Lacombe hospital's business development director, speculated that perhaps the larger percent of baby boomers on the north shore, and their aging, will lead to continued demand for hospital services in the area.

The Lacombe hospital had been owned 49 percent by physicians and 51 percent by MedCath Corp., but as MedCath paid for the recent expansion, the physicians now only own 10 percent, staff members said.

Benjamin Alexander-Bloch can be reached at bbloch@timespicayune.com or 985.898.4827.